How To Lower High Cortisol, The Groundbreaking High-Fat Endurance Study, What Causes Low HRV & More!

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness show, how to lower High cortisol, the groundbreaking high fat endurance study. What causes low hrv cardio before weights or weights before cardio, and much more.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical, physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

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So, Ben, you've got the world's toughest mudder happening this weekend. How you feeling about it?

Yeah, well, let me, let me give you a little bit of an idea of what my home looks like right now. I have a crapload of gear. It looks like I'm like moving to Timbuktu or the far reaches of Siberia right now. So on my kitchen table. Let me just go through my pack list with you. Sleeping bag, blankets, thermal, silver blankets, knee sleeves, bottles, sunscreen, three pairs of shoes, three pairs of socks, three pairs of liners, chamois cream, windbreaker, thermal vest, bulk water, electrolytes, tights, gloves, two headlamps, extra batteries, blister treatment, hand and foot warmers, towels, band aids, anti chafing cream, port, phone charger, wetsuit, hoodie, alcohol wipes, antiseptic spray, sharpie, zip ties, lip balm, trash bags, knee pad, gaiters for shoes, goggles, and a few other random items. And we didn't even get into all the nutrition that I'm bringing. So it is quite a chore to pack for this thing.

Insane. Oh, my gosh. So will you actually be sleeping?

Me?

Yeah.

Oh, no.

So why the sleeping bag?

Absolutely not. For my wife.

Oh, yeah.

She's my Sherpa.

Oh, I see. I see.

Yeah. And if any of our listeners either either have no clue what the world stuff as a motor is, or if you want to follow all the action, couple of things. First of all, for those of you in the usa, on Saturday morning, I'll be texting out all the links and everything to track the race and you can text the word Fitness to 41-12-4741-1247. And that's my free little text club that I send out little, little texts out. Sometimes I'll just drunk Dahlia on a Saturday night. Most of the time. It's useful information. So you can do that. You can text Fitness to 411247 or you can, you can check out the Facebook page because Rachel, I know you're going to be posting some stuff up on there.

Yeah, definitely. Jess is going to be sending us photos so we'll be posting them on Instagram and Facebook and we're going to be posting the link to live follow the race the morning of.

Quite epic. Quite epic. I'll be going for 90 plus miles.

90 plus miles.

Wow. Yeah. So anyway, speaking of which, let's talk about cortisol, etc. Shall we?

News flashes.

So Rachel, you were not a podcast co host slash sidekick when I went through this protocol, but basically two years ago I followed a high fat ketogenic 90% plus fat diet for 12 months and then I went into a lab at University of Connecticut where I ran on a treadmill for three hours and they cut muscle using biopsy out of my thumb thighs to basically and did a ton of blood work to analyze what happens when you follow a low carb, high fat diet for an extended period of time to your fuel utilization during exercise. So the cool thing is people have been asking me so much, what happened? What are the study results? Well, the study just came out. Wow. It's actually really, really interesting. The concept that a diet that's high in carbohydrate is necessary for optimizing your exercise performance is something that's been around since 60s. And basically what happened was back in the 60s they discovered that muscle glycogen depletion, so exhaustion of your muscles carbohydrate stores was associated with fatigue. And they also found out that a high carb diet maintains that muscle glycogen and maintains that performance. And so now here we are decades later and there's tons of evidence that has accumulated that supports consuming carbohydrate before, during and after exercise. It's kind of like one of the fueling paradigms that we follow in a range of sports from hockey to soccer to marathoning to the world's toughest mudder, you name it. So the idea here is that there actually is no zero essential requirement for dietary carbohydrate because the human body actually has this really cool capacity to adapt to low carb availability. So what that means is that when you are starved or when your glycogen levels significantly decrease, or when carbohydrates are not available, you produce what's called hepatic ketone production. Hepatic ketone production. So production of ketones by your liver that increases dramatically to displace glucose as your brain's primary energy source. And then what happens is fatty acids supply the majority of energy for skeletal muscle. How can this occur? Well, basically it comes down to a combination of lactic acid that you produce and also the glycerol backbone of fats being burnt by muscle as a fuel. Basically you create your own carbohydrate. When you don't have an exogenous source of carbohydrate, you have little carbohydrate producing machineries in your body that make glucose. So basically they took us into the lab to see exactly what happens to the body when you do restrict carbohydrates. Can you actually achieve just as good performance? And what else happens? Well, the paper is very long, but it's not that hard to read. It's not that propeller hat ish. I will link to it in the show notes. I'm gonna keep it a mystery what happens. Come on. And potentially I may do full on podcast with the lead researcher in the study, Dr. Jeff Volek. But essentially what it comes down to is we he the researchers, they really kind of rewrote the textbooks when it comes to fat burning and carb burning. And I would especially challenge anyone who is very interested in carbs ketone production and how the body actually produces energy from fat even in the absence of carbohydrate. Go read the discussion section of this particular study. It's all free. The discussion section is actually quite, quite enlightening if that's the correct word to use. And yeah, if you want a little bit of fun reading over the weekend, check it out. We'll link to it in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 338 all right, next up, speaking of cardiovascular exercise and ungodly amounts of time spent on a treadmill or doing loops of the world's toughest mudder, another study came out that is the first study that's been out in a long time that looks at like the whole cardio versus weights versus weights versus cardio. Did I just use the word versus too many times?

Too many times? Yeah, you did. That's okay. We'll give you.

Yeah, so I get this question a lot, especially when it comes to fat loss. Do you do the cardio first or the weights first? And up until this point, the research that existed was primarily done by the Journal of Strength and Conditioning or appeared in the Journal of Strength Conditioning. And what it showed Was that order didn't seem to matter. So most of the studies at this point were done in inactive sedentary people. And the particular research study that was the biggest one done up to this point was done about a year and a half ago. And they put these two different sets of ladies through eight weeks of exercise in which they either did endurance first or strength first. And they found that ultimately it doesn't matter whether you do strength or cardio first if your goal is just fat loss. Okay, but this most recent study in which they looked at overweight men found that when comparing cardio versus strength versus strength versus cardio. There I did it again. What happens when they looked at leptin, which is a marker of appetite and fat burning regulation, and they looked at testosterone, they looked at cortisol, they looked at body fat. They found there wasn't a really significant difference for cortisol or for testosterone. But what they did find was that both groups experienced a significant decrease in body fat and the weights before cardio weightlifting. Before cardio, they came off slightly better in the fat loss category.

How slight is slightly.

And actually it wasn't super significant, but it was enough to test for significance in the actual study. So ultimately, if your goal is weight loss purely, you're going to be better off doing weightlifting first, like warming up, doing your weightlifting and then doing the cardiovascular exercise after, probably because the weightlifting depletes some of your muscle glycogen stores. And then you turn to fatty acids to utilize during the cardio. You know, if you were to do like a series of weightlifting sets followed by, let's say, 20 minutes on a bike or a treadmill or something like that. Now the thing is though, when it comes to both of these studies, they were done in inact active, sedentary, overweight people. And so we can't necessarily extrapolate this to active populations. But there was one other study that was done way back in 2008, back when I was knee high to a grasshopper, or however that phrase goes. Is that how it goes, knee high to a grasshopper?

I'm not sure, but I don't remember.

2008, way back in 2008. And what they found was that in more active people, combining strength and cardio during the same workout, meaning doing like a set of back to back strength exercises, let's say overhead press to a squat, followed by a brief burst of cardio, like 30 to 60 seconds of jumping rope and then going back into back to back strength exercises, back to a cardio burst. So to speak is superior when it comes to fat loss to just doing weights or just doing cardio. So ultimately, what it looks like here is in overweight women, it doesn't seem to matter. In overweight men, weights before cardio seems to matter. And active people mixing it all up in one big jumble seems to be the best solution for fat loss.

There you go.

Yeah, but obviously, fat loss is not necessarily the holy grail for people. For example, if your goal is really good biomechanics and getting as strong as possible, you should definitely do your weights first before you're exhausted by cardio. But if you're, say, a runner who's really working on fat form and efficiency and economy, you don't want to go running after you've done a bunch of, like, deadlifts or squats. So in a case like that, you. You separate the two or you do cardio before weights. So ultimately, that's the skinny on the cardio and the weights. And then the last thing I wanted to mention was a buyer beware warning about probiotics. Oh, probiotics. They did this study on probiotics to see if the probiotics were antibiotic resistant, which is really interesting. And I'm not quite sure if it's that meaningful for folks to know if their probiotics are antibiotic resistant, unless they're, I guess, taking probiotics and antibiotics simultaneously. And even then, it doesn't really matter if the probiotics are antibiotic resistant because you wouldn't want to kill them anyways. But more meaningful on this particular study, and I'll link to the study in the show notes, was the fact that as part of the study, they evaluated whether or not these probiotics even had all of the strains in them that they claimed to have in them.

So what probiotics were they testing?

There were five different strains from a variety of different manufacturers. They didn't list the actual manufacturers, but they tested five different brands of probiotics, and they looked at all the different strains like Lactobacillus and Saccharomyces blardii, and all these different, you know, strange names that they give to the bacteria in the probiotics that you can never pronounce but that are actually on the label of most yogurts, if you turn over the label. And what they found was that most of the yogurt man, or not, yogurt manufacturers, the probiotic manufacturers, when you look at the parts per billion or million of probiotics that they claim to have, they fell far short and some of them barely contained any live bacteria whatsoever in terms of viable active bacteria. Which means that not only are most of the good bacteria dead before they even get to your small intestine, they're dead before you even open the package.

Oh, wow.

It's very important when you're getting probiotics that you pay attention to whether or not it was heated or heat stable. If it's a spore forming probiotic, there's a lot of considerations when it comes to probiotics, so is it worth buying them at all? I think your best bet is a to get dirty. Meaning avoid antibacterial hand soaps, avoid frequent showering with lots of soap, get out in nature, have pets, spend time with kids, expose yourself to a wide variety of bacteria fermented foods, kimchi, kombucha. I think chocolate is a fermented food too.

Yay.

Yeah. And then when it comes to probiotics, what I do is I use them when I travel because I don't have access to a lot of fermented foods. And I'll either use a soil based organism, there's one called prescriptocyst, for example. There's another one that I recently talked about on Facebook because we did a little giveaway and promo of this stuff called Black Water, and that's also water with soil based organisms in it. And they sell a powder too. But that's one option is soil based organisms. The other is heat stable spore forming probiotics. And that would be, for example, the advanced Caprobiotics is one. We've got a few of them at Greenfield Fitness Systems because I evaluate pretty rigorously whether or not there are actual studies that show that the bacteria are alive when they hit your gut. And the ones I have at Greenfield Fitness Systems I'll vouch for. But one is the Exos Probiotic, another one is Caprobiotics Advanced. And then you've got these soil based organisms which are basically the equivalent of going out in your backyard and licking dirt, but with none of the pucker factor. So anyways, what it comes down to is don't just frickin use any old probiotic off the counter. And by the way, a shout out to my friend Rich Roll. I noted that he recently had a fantastic interview on the Microbiome and the Gut on his podcast. And so I don't remember which number it is, but if you go listen to Rich Roll's recent podcast on the benefits of getting dirty and the germ in the Microbiome, he's got Some good information on there too. He interviewed a physician for a couple of hours and it's quite good. So there you go. There's everything that you need to know.

About bacteria and you can receive these news flashes and more, including a bunch of awesome giveaways every single day. If you follow ben@twitter.com BenGreenfield instagram.com BenGreenfieldFitness and facebook.com BG Fitness sorry for all of the different URLs.

Shall we jump into the Q and A?

Let's do it. All right.

Listener Q and A.

Hey there, it's Dean from Australia. I got a question about cortisol. I'm a master's athlete, I'm a road cyclist and I have a pretty high stress job and I'm got one of those, I guess, wound up personalities as well. So last couple of years I've been in a cycle of everything going great. Then I get sick, kind of reset, start again, train, train, train, get sick, reset, start again. And I had a conversation with a good physiotherapist recently who was talking about his experience with elevated cortisol levels and particularly the impact that stress and lifestyle and caffeine can have on cortisol and the end result being the suppressed immune system and getting sick. So I do pretty much everything right in terms of nutrition and I try to sleep well. But yeah, I guess I'm just wondering your thoughts on elevated cortisol and the impact it can have on getting sick while very fit and what can be done naturally to work around that and particularly the role that caffeine may have because I'm a bit of a. Bit of a caffeine junkie. Thanks, guys. Loving the show.

Dean sounds like a cousin of yours, Rachel.

He's my. He's my bro from another mo.

That's right. It's the way you say over, over the land of Oz. Yeah, yeah, I can speak a little Oz. So anyways, cortisol, Cortisol. Cortisol. This is a topic near and dear to my heart because I have personally struggled a bit with hypocortisolism or high cortisol hypercortisolism. Not hypocortisolism, hypercortisolism. Many times on blood tests that I've done and for me it's related to an active lifestyle. What I mean by that is I live pretty low stress. I love my relationships. I shave with great shaving equipment.

You live in a beautiful home that's been fully detoxed.

I'm surrounded by nature and I don't get a lot of WI fi and stuff like that, but I do send my body to hell and back almost every day with the workout.

Like this weekend.

Yeah, Like I've got tough workouts. And then like every, at least every few weeks I'm doing something that scares the hell out of me when it comes to just like putting my body through the wringer. And no matter how healthy you are, how much you sleep, how good your diet is, how good your relationships are, et cetera, even something as simple as just pushing your body above and beyond what our hunter gatherer, farmer ancestors would have done when it comes to low level physical activity throughout the day, that can dump a lot of cortisol into your body. And it's just this uphill battle athletes always have to follow. It's the reason that I will probably, after the world's toughest mudder, be taking a good month at some point. Just super duper easy. Just chilling out, yoga, sitting in the grass in my backyard, staring off into space, petting a goat, holding a chicken.

Just basically taking some cbd.

That's right, that's right. So anyways, yeah, big, big old long bladed grass sticking out of my mouth. Chewing on that with my farmer's hat on. Anyways though. Yes. So cortisol is something that we all have to deal with a little bit. And just kind of a couple quick things on cortisol, I know that most of you could just go to the Wikipedia page for cortisol and learn exactly what it is and what it does. But before we jump into caffeine and cortisol and also cortisol in the immune system, basically cortisol is what's called a glucocorticoid. It's also known as hydrocortisone, which is why when you get a cortisone injection, sometimes you get super stressed out and you grit your teeth and you're up all night. You know, for those people who've gotten like injections in their knees, for example, or on other swollen joints, because it just dumps a bunch of cortisol into your body. And cortisol is produced in your adrenal cortex in response to stress. It's made from cholesterol, which is why if you're on a very, very low fat diet or you don't have enough cholesterol, you actually can have trouble waking up in the morning, because cortisol is what butts you out of bed in the morning. And we get that big peak in cortisol around 8am Ironically, coffee causes you to have a big cortisol dump. It's very strange that we drink a cortisol inducing stimulant at the same time that our cortisol levels are naturally the.

Highest during the day.

It's kind of odd. But coffee is also a digestif. It's got antioxidants. It does some things for your brain. So, you know, there are other benefits to a morning cup of coffee. But it is a little bit strange. It seems like lunchtime, right, or after lunch would be a better afternoon when.

You'Re like, yes, kind of.

Yeah. All the research studies that have been done on coffee and its ability to restrict wakefulness or restrict sleep and restrict deep sleep patterns, or deleteriously affect circadian rhythm, they've all shown that as long as you're kind of finished up with coffee by approximately three hours before bedtime, it's not that big of a deal. But, yeah, I have always thought it strange that we drink coffee as a society at the same time that we are already producing our natural wakefulness hormone. So cortisol helps you deal with stress, which is great. So, for example, it stimulates gluconeogenesis, which basically is the making of new glucose, specifically in your liver. So cortisol actually uses amino acids, lactic acid, glycerol, and something called propionate to create glucose in your liver. And then what happens is it also causes glycogenolysis. So at the same time that it helps your liver to make new glucose, it also helps you to break down glycogen that's stored in your liver and your muscle cells, and that puts glucose into your bloodstream, which you can use to run from the lion. It also inhibits insulin from shuttling glucose cells, so it keeps glucose hanging around out in cells, so you can just access it a little bit more readily when it comes to needing to fight stress. Now, that's what cortisol does from an energetic standpoint, but it affects other things too, like bone and muscle. So cortisol inhibits the uptake of amino acids into muscle cells, which means that if your cortisol is very, very high for too long, it can be very difficult to fuel muscles because you've already got cortisol lowering insulin, and at the same time, you've got cortisol inhibiting the uptake of other nutrients into muscle cells. So your muscles have a very hard time getting both amino acids as well as glucose. When you have high levels of cortisol, it also inhibits, again, in excess, it inhibits bone formation and decreases calcium absorption in your intestines. So both your muscles and your bones can suffer from elevated excess cortisol. Yeah, a few other things that it does. It actually increases your sensitivity to epinephrine and also to norepinephrine. And what that means is it causes vaso restriction, or reduced blood flow in many parts of your body, primarily so you can shunt blood flow to your core to help you to survive. And so in many cases, you'll get, like, increased blood pressure, for example, especially because cortisol also serves as an antidiuretic. So it causes your body to retain sodium. And this is why high blood pressure is one of those things that of course, we know goes hand in hand with high amounts of stress or high amounts of cortisol. Right now there are some. Oh, go ahead, go ahead.

Oh, no. I've got my propeller hat on and I'm just piecing together all the information.

That's why I'm really want to. I don't know if I've really gone into everything that cortisol does before on a podcast. This is juicy, juicy. I've got very low levels of T3. I showed this on the recent blood test that I went through my entire blood panel on a recent blog post@BenGreenfieldFitness.com so that all the world could see how effed up my body is. It's actually not that bad. But there were two areas that were a little bit affected deleteriously by the amount of primarily physical stress that I put my body through. One is T3. And one major reason for that is cortisol can interfere with the production of thyroid hormones. And specifically, even if your thyroid gland is producing adequate T4, which is a precursor to T3, high amounts of cortisol inhibit the conversion of T4 to T3. And the other thing that happens is cortisol can shut down the production of testosterone because the human body does not want to create babies in a time of famine, stress, running from lions, et cetera. So sex hormone binding globulin, which binds to total testosterone and causes it to not be able to be available in its free active form, is something that fat gets increased again in response to high amounts of cortisol. So you've got basically shutting down of the reproductive system and shutting down of the thyroid and the metabolic system.

Now, when you say high cortisol, is it kind of like chronically high cortisol, like over an extended period of time?

Over an extended period of time, exactly.

So how long do you think that would be.

It varies from person to person because genetically, if your ancestors were a very hardy population, you'll find that. And then I'm just going to throw population out here. I'm not saying this to be like racist or anything like that, but let's say you're like Jewish, right? You come from a lineage that has been exposed to high amounts of stress, wars, famine, lots of moving, nomadic lifestyles, et cetera, and you would be able to handle a higher amount of cortisol for a higher period of time if genetically, that is your lineage, at least theoretically, like that's the way that it would work. Whereas I don't know if you're a big fat Samoan Islander whose ancestors sat around playing the ukulele and eating coconuts.

I can't believe that's what you think Samoans do. Samoans are hard asses. They make up the majority of every rugby team.

I love, love all our Samoan listeners. But anyway, so. So the answer is it really does truly depend, you know, those people. Like my wife. Wife for example, comes from this hard Montana rancher line, right? And she can just, she can go all day, whereas I need a nap. Like, you know, is it just differentdifferent strokes for different folks? So the other interesting thing, because I've also struggled in the past with gut issues and I know a lot of our listeners do have this issue as well, but cortisol causes an increase in gastric acid production and when this occurs chronically, that can lead to things like acid reflux and, and it can cause other problems in your small intestine. And the decreased blood flow from the increased sensitivity to epinephrine and norepinephrine, part of the decreased blood flows to your GI tract. Your body doesn't want to digest food when you're stressed out. And so that can cause incredible problems with digestion, constipation, lack of nutrient absorption, a lot of other issues that people have to deal with. And again, I know for me personally, the more stressed out I am, the more I deal with things like gut issues or having to spend a long amount of time on the toilet. Just there's things that you would think, would you kind of know theoretically that they're response to stress, but there are actually biological things happening in your body, like decreased enzyme production, decreased hydrochloric acid production, decreased blood flow to the intestine that causes those issues. Sympathetic nervous system activation, you know, when pooping and digesting is all parasympathetic nervous system activation. So basically I'm hoping I've convinced folks enough that you do not want to necessarily have chronically elevated cortisol levels. So there were basically two things that Dean asked about. The effects of caffeine on cortisol and also the effects of cortisol on the immune system. So the main thing with immunity is that if you're stressed out, you do get sick more easily because high amounts of cortisol suppress you, your T cells. And these are important immune cells responsible for causing your immune system to be able to fight off infections, et cetera. You'll find a lot of times in people who are exercising chronically a very, very low white blood cell count. And this can go hand in hand with that low T cell count. And it's kind of a good 1, 2 combo for not being able to fight off infections very easily. Now, granted, there are things that you can take to naturally increase white blood cell production or to improve your immunity. So, for example, chaga mushroom extract is one that I've talked about before as a really, really good way to improve the activity of your immune system. Astragalus is an herbal extract that's also very good for the immune system. You'll see everything from like echinacea to elderberry to vitamin C as things that can help out in a case of low immune function. Some of those actually have research behind them. Some of them are alternative medical remedies that don't have a great deal of research, but a lot of anecdotal evidence. People who I know for me, when I use elderberry and when I use vitamin C, I use chaga, I use a little bit of oregano. If I've been around sick people or I feel a sickness coming on, and it does help quite a bit. I used to get sick all the time. I just don't anymore. So that's one thing. When it comes to cortisol and chronic exercise, et cetera, in general, especially endurance exercise, seems to cause us a little bit more than strength based exercise. You do get a suppression of the immune system, and those are some of the things that you can do about it. When it comes to coffee, you have to take into consideration some of the things that, that I talked about already. The fact that in the morning you're already producing a bunch of cortisol. But caffeine has been shown to stimulate cortisol production. That is undeniable. And they've also found. This was a study in the Journal of Psychosomatic medicine back in 2005. They found that regular coffee Drinking can actually increase your tolerance to the effect of caffeine to induce a cortisol spike. And so what this means is that this is probably the increase in cortisol is probably more of an issue for a people who are drinking coffee few and far between and finding that if they're stressed out and you don't drink coffee very much, you shouldn't drink coffee if you're stressed, period. If you're a habitual coffee drinker, it may have a little bit less of a cortisol stimulating effect. So that's one thing to bear in mind. And then the other thing is that part of this is, of course, the doses and the poison and small amounts of coffee are probably not as big of an issue as the folks who are drinking three, four, five cups of coffee during the day and especially drinking coffee in the evenings. So that's the main thing.

That's a funny little cycle. If you drink more coffee, you decrease your response to it. Increasing your cortisol. Yeah, but you need to drink less coffee in order to stop in the first place.

Yeah, but that's the deal with. With coffee in general. We become tolerant to its wakefulness effects. We become tolerant to its cortisol inducing effects. Frankly, just, you know, unfortunately, coffee just does less for you, period.

The more you drink it, the more you drink it.

But, you know, one of the things that coffee does do, and this is interesting, is it has a peristaltic effect, meaning that it can induce a bowel movement in the morning. And I know that a lot of people use it just. Just for that, to be able to, you know, go to the bathroom. And that's.

Is that why you use it, Ben? Because we all know how much you love pooping?

You know what? I actually, I. Well, first of all, I am now almost.

Let's get deep into it.

I'm almost 17 days into no coffee, no alcohol.

Oh, wow. Yeah. How's it going?

Oh, I'm gonna have eight freaking shots of espresso and a margarita after that. World's toughest mutter. I can tell you right now, it's actually going quite well. I feel great. And oddly enough, I've actually been a little bit hungry when I wake up in the morning, because I think I'm consuming 150 to 200 fewer calories in the evening from a glass of wine. And I didn't really put anything else in to replace those calories. And so it's interesting, I had never really thought about how much those calories from alcohol add up. And then the coffee. You know what I'm on. Like I'm doing green tea with a little bit of chaga mushrooms. Speaking of chaga and I feel fine.

And how's the morning poop?

The morning poo doesn't seem to have been deleteriously affected, but again, I am drinking a nice big hot warm beverage of green tea. So that may be replacing some of the effects of coffee. And granted, green tea also has a little bit of caffeine in it. So that's the deal with coffee and caffeine and the immune system and cortisol. So ultimately I really haven't given Dean that many solutions. And so I just want to tell you a couple of things real quick. I'm going to put all of these references in the show notes for you over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 338. If you do struggle with high cortisol, some of the best things that you can do. First of all, I've got an article called Seven of the Best Ways to Stop Stress. I will link to this in the show notes for you. I'm not going to get into a ton of detail on this, but the primary stress reducing activities, because there are a ton of them. But the ones that have been shown to have the most beneficial effect on reducing cortisol and have been shown in clinical studies to reduce salivary levels of cortisol. One would be breathing. There are baroreceptors in your chest that respond to shallow chest breathing and produce cortisol in response to that.

It's so incredible that something so fundamental could have such a profound effect. Just breathe deeply.

Deep diaphragmatic nasal breathing and turning that into a daily habit. That's why I love starting off your day with yoga because you set that habit, you set that pattern. And I start off every day with 10 to 15 minutes of yoga. Just so I do a lot of this deep nasal breathing.

And I also find that when you get used to breathing that way, you notice when your breathing then becomes quite shallow, which is a sign of being stressed, which enables you to be able to actually tell when you're stressed and minimize it.

Yeah, and there's all these like, I don't use any of the apps or like straps that you wear that'll like detect shallow chest breathing, etc. I just, I just don't. Just because I'm, I like to be a little bit more unplugged during the day. But there are, there are tools out there that you could, you could look into for that type of thing. And by the way, if you are listening in and you have any breathing tools that you personally like to use, let Dean know in the comments and we can pass that information on to him. So leave a comment if you have something helpful to add. Meditation is the second thing in addition to breathing and obviously meditation in many cases incorporates breathing. So that'd be number two. Whether it's transcendental, whether it's mindfulness meditation, whether it's moving meditation, like a very easy swim or something like that. There are a variety of ways to skin that cat. But meditation also good science behind that. Yoga, you're noticing a little bit of a pattern here. Interesting. All incorporate breathing, all are very light, restorative. So yoga and also yoga's Chinese sister. I'm just making that up. Tai Chi. So either yoga or Tai Chi or both. Both have been shown again to decrease salivary cortisol. There's a really good DVD called Tai Chi for beginners. I own it and I'll just stick that in every once in a while and watch it. It's just this old Chinese dude in like this white cool flowing outfit walking through these different moves like the crane and you know, these little animal esque movements. Very much like the old guys of the park.

Just so serene, Just pure serenity.

Yeah, exactly. It actually is quite calming.

Yeah.

So neurofeedback using coherence, this is another one that you can do. And there is this technique. I'll just give you the URL. Go to heartmath.org heartmath.org and you can learn something called the quick coherence technique. And it's simply a matter of thinking of something that you're grateful for, something that you love. Closing your eyes, placing that into your heart, breathing it into the center of your chest, taking a moment to reflect upon that and then moving on. But you can tie that into biofeedback, meaning that heartmath, they have hardware that you can purchase and you attach a little clip to your ear and it analyzes your heart rate variability at the same time that you're going through all these thought patterns and coherence. And you can do things like make sure flowers grow on a computer screen as you're learning how to consciously control your nervous system. It's pretty cool.

That sounds awesome.

Yeah. And so I'll link to the article in which I talk about more thoroughly about how to do that. But that would be another of the stress reducing methods. And then finally, last one I'll throw at you here. And again, check out the article for all the details on this stuff. Sleep. And that's a biggie. And what happens, it's very interesting. A lot of times we will get very busy and throw in some exercise, throw in a new hobby, throw in some relationships, et cetera. Short, a little sleep here, a little sleep there, and pretty soon it adds up very quickly. So sleep is a biggie. My pattern almost every day is seven to eight hours of sleep each night. I'm one of those 10pm to bed, 6am up kind of guys and then a quick snooze after lunch. That's pretty much every day for me. And I've been putting a little bit of extra sleep in the bank this week just because I know I'm not gonna be sleeping much. Yeah.

This weekend.

Running and jumping off cliffs in the water. And then supplements. I get a lot of questions about this. Remember, you cannot out supplement a stressful lifestyle. But there are some things that I do recommend for anyone dealing with high levels of cortisol. I'm gonna throw them out to you pretty quick here, but Chinese adaptogenic herbs like Tian Qi is the one that I like. Those can help you to lower cortisol when cortisol is high or raise it when cortisol is low. High levels of cortisol and stress do a very good job exhausting your adrenal glands of minerals. So high electrolyte intake and mineral intake via things like sea salts and liquid minerals. That's also a very good solution. You'll go through vitamin D much more quickly when you're stressed out. And so taking anywhere from 2,000 to 4,000 international units of vitamin D, vitamin D a day, vitamin C. Your adrenals are also a storehouse for vitamin C. So anywhere again from 1000 to 5000 milligrams of vitamin C a day. And then finally, because cortisol causes a histamine release that increases inflammation, some kind of a fish oil can be quite helpful as well. These are all the type of things you'd use for adrenal stress, adrenal fatigue, et cetera. The very, very last resource I want to give you is the most comprehensive book I've ever read on cortisol, written by a friend of mine, Sean Talbot. It's called the Cortisol Connection Book. And just a quick read, grab it off of Amazon. I'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. But yeah, there's, you know, we could obviously do a three hour podcast on cortisol.

Yeah.

But those are the biggies. Dean, I hope that's helpful for you. And again, if any of you are listening and you have comments or your own tips to share, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 338 and share the love.

Hi Ben, this is Ryan Walker. I'm from Mobile, Alabama. I love the podcast. Addicted to the podcast. Share it with everybody. I have a question that I've been dying to ask for the longest time now. My mother, or my grandmother on my mother's side was a paranoid schizophrenic. When I found this out, I was absolutely terrified that I might start to display symptoms and develop schizophrenia myself. I'm 24 years old. I haven't displayed any paranoid delusions or symptoms. However, I can be paranoid at times, but I think rightfully so. I was hoping that maybe you could give me a list of things that I can stay away from lifestyle factors to avoid any epigenetic expression such as foods. Staying away from stress. I heard that stress can be an issue. So I've tried managing stress through some TM in the mornings. I do 20 minutes of transcendental meditation trying to manage stress that way. Another thing would be foods. I have heard, which this may be complete bs, but that cow's milk or cow dairy may actually contribute to the expression of that gene. So I don't know if that's true. If not, please clarify and please just give me a list of some lifestyle factors to stay away from or some things to even implement to mitigate the potential effects of onset schizophrenia. Thank you. Bye bye.

This is an interesting question, isn't it? I don't know that we've talked that much about schizophrenia on the show. And I should point out that I am not a doctor, nor am I a psychiatrist, nor do I wear a lab coat, nor do I do frontal lobotomies on anyone, ever. Never done that, not even on a pet. So.

So talk to your doctor.

Talk to your doctor. However, there is pretty much unanimous agreement among experts that schizophrenia develops as a result of the interplay between biological predispositions inheriting certain genes, basically, and the kind of environment that you get exposed to.

Yes.

And so you are definitely born with, depending on parental factors, a higher risk for schizophrenia genetically, or lower risk, as the case may be. And then your epigenetic environment or the kind of triggers that you pull from an environmental standpoint can then further increase the risk that that genetic predisposition to schizophrenia is going to develop into it actually manifesting itself. So this is just a simple case of nature versus Nurture. So, I mean, you know, for example, there was one study that. And this is not schizophrenia. This is more like aggression and criminality. But this was back in 2002. They identified this gene called the MAOA gene, and they termed this. Scientists termed this the violence gene. And what they found was that it was associated with aggression and criminal activity, and that people who had this gene had a higher than normal risk of growing up to be antisocial or violent. But this was only if they were neglected or abused as children. So if they had this violent gene, but they also had a loving, non abusive family, they turned out just fine. So that's just one example of the nature versus nurture type of thing with schizophrenia. An example of the theory of schizophrenia. For example, there was one pretty recent research study that showed that people who have multiple copies of a version of the gene associated with schizophrenia and who smoke marijuana or use cannabis, they increase their risk of developing schizophrenia by 1000%.

Wow.

So that would be one example of something that you should definitely avoid if you have genetic predisposition to schizophrenia. This is because of the interplay between marijuana and dopamine receptors. We just published or about to publish a article on this from the Examine Research Digest. If you want to dig into dopamine schizophrenia and marijuana a little bit more, Rachel, that's going live on the Facebook page this week.

I think it might be live already.

Okay, cool.

So I think it's today.

If you want to read that whole article for free on dopamine, schizophrenia, and marijuana, go to facebook.com bgfitness that's facebook.com bgfitness so we know that weed is one issue when it comes to development of schizophrenia. If you have a genetic predisposition to it. A lot of the research that's been done on schizophrenia, unfortunately for our dear listener Ryan, has been done on what the mother does while she's pregnant with you. Everything from alcohol and lead exposure causing increased risk for schizophrenia, to exposure to genital herpes during pregnancy, taxoplasmosis, which is. Which is basically like your mom having a cat, which is kind of interesting. But cats carry a taxoplasmosis gene, and they found that if your mom has exposure to that while she's pregnant with you and you have the gene for schizophrenia, it could increase your risk for developing it later on in life.

How bizarre.

I know.

That is so bizarre.

But if you Google the term cat lady schizophrenia, there actually is some evidence that women, women who spend a lot of time around cats who have the gene for Schizophrenia tend to develop that because a lot of cats will carry this taxoplasmosis gene. I'm serious. Take the deep dive into that one on the Googles. Yeah. Low folic acid levels during pregnancy, low choline availability during pregnancy, like low amounts of fish oil. But I know that this is probably just kind of like a, a depressing topic for you if you're listening in and you aren't able to go back and like be born again. So what can you do?

Tell your mom what to do while she's pregnant with you?

Yeah, mom. So anyways, what can you do if you know that you have the gene for schizophrenia to prevent schizophrenia, in addition to avoiding marijuana, one is fish oil. They found that omega 3 fatty acids found in fish oil may lower the risk of psychotic disorders from getting worse and even prevent psychosis from occurring in the first place.

Wow.

So this is probably related to the enhanced neural function that occurs from a high intake of omega 3 fatty acids. So that's one that I would definitely look into, would be the use of essential fats and specifically omega 3 fatty acids. So the breaking down or stripping of essential fats from the brain is actually done by this enzyme called, called phospholipase. And phospholipase appears to be overexpressed in people who have schizophrenia, which means that schizophrenics would have lower levels of fatty acids in the frontal cortex of their brain. So using high amounts of omega 3 fatty acids. When I say high amounts, you have some people, some fitness quote, unquote experts, guys like Charles Poliquin, for example, recommending like 40 plus grams of fish oil per day. I've never recommended fish oil doses, just is that high. But for the regular person, I recommend about 1 to 4 grams per day, depending on how much fish you're eating. And if you're looking at needing more because of a high level of turnover from something like high levels of this enzyme called phospholipase, you'd probably be closer to 8 to 10 grams per day of fish oil. And so almost double slash, triple the dosages of what's normally recommended. The other part of the essential fat story is that these essential fats are also prone to destruction in the brain and in the diet by oxidants. And there's also evidence that there's more oxidation in the frontal cortex of people who have schizophrenia. So not only do you want to consume these essential fats, but you want to ensure that they are not oxidized. Now, the main vitamins that tend to show that they can keep essential fatty acids from being oxidized in the human body are vitamin A, vitamin C and vitamin C, E. So using like a multivitamin that has those antioxidants in them, or consuming a fish oil that's packaged with those antioxidants, there's one called super essentials that I like. It's called Super Essentials Fish oil. And it's packaged with antioxidants, astaxanthin, cold processed, so it's like not prone to oxidation and also has antioxidants with it as well. That'd be another thing. And then of course, as you can probably guess, in any form of smoking and carcinogen exposure, like barbecued meats, processed meats, smoking any of these sources of oxidants can destroy a lot of these antioxidants more readily, especially vitamin C, and also lead to more oxidation, these essential fatty acids. So doing a lot more boiling, steaming, raw cooking, blending, juicing, and then avoiding cigarette smoke and of course, marijuana smoke would be another very important thing to do in terms of reducing risk for schizophrenia methylation. So a faulty methylation means that you're going to develop a lot of this amino acid in your bloodstream called homocysteine. And many people with schizophrenia tend to have these very, very high levels of homocysteine, Even if they're not taking in a lot of the things that can cause high homocysteine, like synthetic folic acid, such as you would find in like a cheap common multivitamin that's going to dump a bunch of folic acid into your body and that can get converted into homocysteine. And these high levels of homocysteine are associated with schizophrenia. It's probably because people diagnosed with schizophrenia probably also have a genetic variation of this homocysteine lowering enzyme, which may mean that they need more of an active form of folic acid. So what this comes down to is if you have genetic risk for schizophrenia or have schizophrenia, there's a form of folic acid called methyltetrahydrofolate. MTHFR, methyltetrahydrofoLate. You want to look for a multivitamin that has that form of folic acid in it. Because just for anybody, not even people with schizophrenia, high levels of folic acid can cause some serious health issues. And so you don't want to use a synthetic folic acid supplement like, like most multivitamins use nowadays. You want to use this stuff called methyl tetrahydrofolate. Methyl tetrahydrofolate so and the exos multi.

That you suggest is that kind in it?

Yeah, the one I take, the, the exos that definitely has MTHFR in it. And that, that multivitamin was one like I, I was actually on well down the path to formulating my own multivitamin using raw ingredients from a, from a number of different manufacturers and then realized that this company exos like 40 miles from my house at the Thorne facility in Dover, Idaho, they were already producing a multivitamin that satisfied all these criteria and many more. So that one you can find@BenGreenfieldFitness.com multi full disclosure. I'm on their board and I profit from that multivitamin. But there's a reason for that because it's what I take, it's what my wife takes.

I believe in it.

Yeah, I believe in it. So anyways, that would be another thing. And then the last thing is just food allergies. Some people with mental health problems can be very sensitive to gluten. That's primarily related to what's talked about in the book Grain brain and the neural inflammation that very concentrated high levels of gluten can cause. And there were studies back in the 50s that showed that schizophrenic children frequently have celiac disease or severe gluten allergies. And so eliminating gluten from the diet would probably be prudent. It'd probably be prudent for sure. So I'll put some of these resources in the shownotes for you Ryan, and if you have questions you can leave them in the comments there. But those are some of the biggies that I'd start with would be avoiding marijuana, taking some essential fats, fatty acids, using a good multi, checking for food allergies and then also getting some antioxidants into your system.

There you go.

Hi, Ben Donella from New Zealand. I have a question for you about protein powder. So I've been using the MHP Paleo protein, which is a beef and egg white protein. I noticed the other day when I went to reorder it that it says it's not suitable for nursing moms. So I'm nursing my 8 month old and I couldn't find any information online as to why it wouldn't be suitable and I couldn't find any information from the company themselves. Perhaps you could shed some light on this as to why I wouldn't be able to use that protein. And if you think that I shouldn't, maybe you have a suggestion for another protein that would be okay. For me to use. Well nursing, thanks so much. Love the show.

So Rachel, I think Daniela is probably trying to have a big old swole muscular baby. What do you think?

That's definitely what she's going for.

She wants to have the next Arnold.

Yes.

Governor of California, of course. And as we all know, the best way to have a large muscular baby is to consume a lot of protein powder while breastfeeding. Well said. Baby is breastfeeding. Yes, of course.

Win win.

You should probably throw some creatine in there too and maybe some kind of like jacked ephedra based supplement so they're very hyperactive and able to lift more. Little pre workout booster for your baby. Yeah, Proteinso first of all, there's nothing inherent in protein. If you were to exceed 200 grams of protein per day, you'd probably get a little bit of nitrogenous buildup that might make your milk taste crappy or, or put some ammonia in the milk. But that's really not a big issue unless you're just eating a seriously large amount of man in a can while you're pregnant.

So why did the protein company say that she shouldn't use it while nursing?

So there's a couple reasons that this could be likely. First of all, I don't know if you heard about the study a couple years ago that found that most protein powders have really high naturally occurring levels of trace heavy metals. Interestingly, the vegan proteins tend to even have higher heavy metal counts than the animal based proteins like whey and whey isolate. And usually I'm a pretty good advocate of vegan based proteins like living protein is the one that I use. But there can be some metals in these just naturally high levels of metals. So you may want to be careful from that perspective and you can contact just about any manufacturer and ask for a certificate of analysis of heavy metal contamination and testing. But if you aren't able to get that, you may want to be careful with protein powder while breastfeeding because of that. So in most folks it's very, very trace levels. It's not that much. It was kind of blown out proportion the study. But it is something to know if you're breastfeeding. Especially because babies are little metals are gonna, they're vulnerable, they're very vulnerable especially to metals and they're growing. And we won't even get into the vaccine discussion at this point.

We want to help them develop as.

We talk about metals sweeteners. So saccharin, sucralose, acesulfamine, potassium et cetera not only if you're pregnant, can a lot of that cross the placenta and could remain in fetal tissue, but it can also wind up in breast milk. And we still don't know a lot about how, how fully these are metabolized. And there is some evidence that they can cause some damage to, for example, bacteria, specifically potentially your gut bacteria. Granted that study was done in rats with ungodly amounts of artificial sweeteners, but it's still one of those things where I say proceed with caution when it comes to artificial sweeteners. And many protein powders have artificial sweeteners in them along with a lot of other additives. So herbal stimulants, for example, are commonly found in protein, extra caffeine, creatine. Last I checked, nobody was sneaking any booze into protein powder. But that's about the only thing that you'll find left out of protein powder in many cases. So it all comes down to the cleanliness of the powder itself. And when you combine that with the fact that you can get some amino acids from bone broth and if you're concerned about protein intake, you can just get yourself some nice, you know, some, some nice eggs from free range hens that haven't been fed a bunch of grains and corn and you can eat some, you know, if you're concerned about food allergies or the, you know, the latest red meat scare, you can get like a really hypoallergenic meat, like a good lamb for example, is very hypoallergenic when it comes to meat or like a grass fed beef. And you can use for example, amino acids, like essential amino acids, acids, capsules, which are basically everything you'll find in a protein powder from a protein standpoint with none of the calories or the additives. And a lot of these milks out there, like goat milk and you can combine almond milk and rice milk and there's a lot of different ways that you can get adequate protein without necessarily using a protein powder. So would you recommend, unless of course, you do want your baby to get swole, in which case just use, use it.

So would you recommend that you don't use a protein powder while breastfeeding?

I would recommend that unless you are 100% sure it doesn't have artificial sweeteners, it's been tested for heavy metals and doesn't have additives like caffeine or any other herbal stimulants in it that you move along and find another way to get your protein.

Hi Ben, this is Shane. I found you through The Less Doing podcast and I had a question on hrv. I've been testing with the Sweetbeat app for a couple of months now and I am consistently low, at least what I think is low, somewhere between 17 and maybe up to 35 on HRV. I pegged the stress meter on the thing, even when I turn the sensitivity to the lowest. So I'm trying to figure out is there something wrong with me? What does it mean when horizontal HRV is that low and where do I find out something specific? I sent info off to the Sweet Beak folks and they kind of sent me a generic thing back that that's not a diagnostic tool and they can't help. So I'm not looking for a diagnosis. I'm looking for what does it mean when things are so low? I'm a generally healthy person, about 43, about 160, and work out on a regular basis, so not sure what it means. Anyway, thank you very much. Love your show.

Talk to you later. That's a really low hrv, Shane, you're probably gonna die.

Oh, Ben.

Or horribly amputation. Yeah, that actually is a really low HRV or heart rate variability. And first of all, if you don't know what heart rate variability is and you've never heard heard any of our podcasts on heart rate variability, go get yourself some self education because I'm not going to go over that all in this particular episode. But go to greenfieldfitnesssystems.com naturebeat that's greenfieldfitnesssystems.Com naturebeat I've got all the articles and podcasts I've ever done on like HRV101 there. Yeah, but when it comes to low heart rate variability or low hrv, first of all, that does not necessarily forecast impending reductions in performance. So for example, they did a study of tennis players and they found that after they had followed 30 days of overreaching and getting very close to over training, by decreasing their heart rate variability Quite significantly between 15 and 50%, they actually had improved performance at the end of that program. Meaning that if you are training, you can purposefully intentionally reduce your HRV by overreaching, training yourself a little bit harder than usual. And as long as you program in smart recovery from that, that low HRV can actually come back to help you as long as you get it back up. Interesting. So that would be one situation in which a low HRV is a good thing. The other situation, situation in which we actually tend to see a low HRV is in athletes who are training with a high amount of Sympathetic nervous system training and what I mean by that are like CrossFitters, sprinters, people who are doing a relatively low amount of aerobic training. So we're not talking about people who are say, like doing CrossFit and also going on a long run on the weekends and maybe another long bike ride halfway through the week. Week. We're not talking about, for example, triathletes who both weightlift and do cardio. Those would be examples of situations in which low HRV is probably just an indication of you beating yourself up too much. But low HRV can also be caused by an imbalance between sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system training. Which is why when you turn on the TV and you see the guys in like the World's Strongest man competition and competing, those guys couldn't run a mile to save their lives. But they're big, they're strong, they're quite robust and healthy at what they do. And those guys are all going to have a low heart rate variability simply because they're so skewed towards sympathetic nervous system activation, towards more of like the fast twitch power strength type of training. And so if that is your sport, if that's your poison, then low heart rate variability is not something you should be too concerned about because you want an imbalance, you want to be good at sprinting and not that great at running miles. Like an interview I heard once with, I believe it was Venus Williams who said she's very careful not to ever run more than a mile because she doesn't want a lot of slow twitch muscle fiber. She doesn't want to get slower, she doesn't need that much endurance, theoretically, even though I would argue that being able to run five miles is probably going to serve you pretty well in a four hour tennis match. But ultimately, low HRV is not always a bad thing. It's not always a bad thing. Sometimes you want to purposefully dig yourself into that low HRV hole and sometimes you want to, depending on your goals, have an imbalance in the type of training that you do.

And where can he find some specific information?

So I'll give you some more information here in a second about what to do if you don't fall into the categories that I just described. But you also have a low hrv because a low HRV, if it's not related to what I just described. There's a lot of things that have been associated with low hrv, such as increased risk of heart attack and other cardiac events, coronary heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, high Cholesterol, that that cluster is associated with a low hrv. People with a low HRV are at a higher risk of dying in the subsequent three years. So you thought I was joking, but I'm really.

I did think you were joking.

Yeah. There's actually this study that appeared in the European Medical and Pharmacology Journal that looked at the link between heart rate variability and death due to myocardial infarction and showed that when your HRV is consistently low, it is a sign that the ticker may need a little bit of help. So we've also seen that, like in elderly people, a high HRV is very strongly associated with longevity. And a lot of elderly people who have been tested with high HRV are relatively free of many morbidity factors. So, you know, just this morning I posted my personal HRV that I measure each morning to the Internet, just because every once in a while I want to kind of, kind of show people, you know, what all the numbers look like if you. If you are doing things mostly right. I know I talked about how I do lead a relatively stressful lifestyle, but my HRV is pretty good because even though I'm beating myself up with exercise stress, I have a very good combination of aerobic and anaerobic exercise. So that means my parasympathetic and my sympathetic nervous system are pretty well balanced.

Balanced.

And my HRV is kind of high. So basically, basically, as far as some of the best things to raise an HRV that is low, actually, even before I get into that, the kind of things that can lower an hrv, the things that I've found to have the biggest effect on lowering hrv, one would be lack of sleep. So that would be a biggie. My heart rate variability is always lower after a bad night of sleep. Any type of excess sympathetic anaerobic training, which I already mentioned. Shallow breathing. Shallow breathing can significantly lower hrv. So you may want to check your breath patterns. Also, any type of antihistamine, right, like Nyquil or Zequil or something like that drops HRV extremely, extremely low. I'm not quite sure of exactly why that happens, but I'm guessing it has to do something with the effects of antihistamines on the vagus nerve. Nerve. So that's another one that will lower hrv. And then the last one would just be heart disease. So you may want to listen to the episode we had a couple of Weeks ago, episode 336 on heart disease, because it's possible that you may just want to go get your Ticker checked out as well. So as far as what else to do, things that can raise hrv, I mean, we have a ton of resources. If you go to greenfieldfitnesssystems.com naturebeat and check that out, because there's a lot of things that can increase hrv. Also, what you'll find is that changes of HRV related to specific pathologies. Actually, Wikipedia has a great article on heart rate variability and they do get into some other things like liver psoriasis, diabetic neuropathy, which you could also look at as wanting to get your liver enzymes checked and checking your facet blood blood glucose, because both of those can cause a reduction in hrv and even some chiropractic issues, right? Like cervical. Cervical imbalances or thoracic imbalances in your vertebra. Like structural abnormalities, musculoskeletal abnormalities. Maybe you just need to go get a freaking good massage, you know?

Always need a good massage.

Yeah, but I'm serious, like, if your spine is malaligned, you may want to go see a good, like chiropractic doc who can adjust you or an osteopathic physician to, you know, make sure that none of that is affecting your HRV as well. A lot of things you can go after. So, you know, sometimes it takes some detective work, but I hope that helps Shane and opens your eyes to the wonderful, broad, sometimes confusing, but enchanting world of hrv. So there you have it. Rachel, what do you think? We do have a review this week.

It's my favorite time, the first favoritest.

Time of the show. So this is the time of the show. I feel like we need like some kind of gentle, lulling piano music. This is the time of the show when Rachel reads her review. So if you leave a review, if you go to itunes, leave us a review. Be nice. And by be nice, I mean leave five stars and an effing great review.

That's the only way it gets read on the podcast.

That's right. And if you do that, then we will read your review review on the podcast. And if you hear review red, all you have to do is email gear greenfieldfitnesssystems.com that's gear greenfieldfitnesssystems dot com and when you email said address, we will send you a sweet tech T shirt, bpa, free water bottle, an awesome Ben Greenfield fitness beanie. All three come in a box to your house. Make sure you let us know your T shirt size too, because we'll send you send you a T shirt. And these are sweet T shirts. I love my T shirt. I want one my kids have. Baby, you don't have one.

I don't have one. I want a Team Greenfield shirt. Take photos and post it to Instagram. When you're doing doing fun stuff like running 24 hour tough mudders.

Email me after this. I'll make sure that we. All right. We get you a shirt, I'll cut you a deal. I'll give you a 10% discount. Rachel anyways though. So what do you think? Let's hear the review.

All right, let's do it. It's by Mrod31 this is by far the best health and fitness podcast out there. I've been listening to various podcasts and they all seem to be saying the same things. Ben brings something different and has definitely opened my eyes to so many more health and fitness topics. I think what the best thing is is that he actually does his research on all of the topics. Unlike some other folks who seem to try and work through the subject matter, Ben actually knows what he's talking about and doesn't miss a beat. I'm happy to have found this podcast and Rachel is a welcome addition.

Oh, you just score some points.

He got some serious points.

He, she, whoever was. You just, you just scored some Rachel points. Which is.

You're in.

Those are good for something if you ever go to Australia. Oh yeah, yeah. There's some good, good Oz karma going on there.

You want us to answer your question on the podcast? You need Rachel points.

So if you are listening in, don't turn off the show yet because I want to tell you this weekend's episode is going to be fantastic. You're going to learn how to regrow limbs, heal how to heal stuff. Amazing podcast with Sean Stanley. Crazy. And then you will not hear Rachel or I next week because we have a substitute podcast. Reason being I am off on a week long free diving course and will be. I'm writing a blog post about this because I am going to be experimenting with the effects of ketosis on breath holding time and free diving performance. And I'll be writing an article on my use of MCT powders and liquid ketones during that experiment. So that will be an interesting one. Stay tuned for that. Speaking of ketones, check out the groundbreaking high fat endurance study that I just posted the link to@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 338We have a bunch of crazy interviews coming up so don't turn off the show. Make sure you subscribe to it on itunes. I mean now you can turn it off because we're done. But don't turn it off permanently. So subscribe on itunes. Tell your friends thanks for listening in. And I'm Ben Greenfield. She's Rachel Brown. Signing up. BenGreenfulFitness.com Later, Rachel.

Later, Ben.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

SA. It.